Boulder County's giant cottonwood catches fire

"The Big Tree" smolders on Thursday morning after crews responded to a fire in the tree. (Boulder County Parks & Open Space/courtesy photo)

HYGIENE -- The giant plains cottonwood known to Hygiene-area residents as "The Big Tree" smoldered Thursday after catching fire overnight.

Ron Stewart, director of Boulder County's Parks and Open Space Department, said Hygiene Fire Protection crews responded to the fire Thursday morning and that the interior of the 105-foot-

tall tree was smoldering.

The blaze might have been started by an illegal campfire or a lightning strike, Stewart said. A campfire ring was found on one side of the tree, but lightning also was reported in the area during a recent rainstorm, he said. The tree -- nearly 9 feet in diameter, almost 36 feet around and the onetime "national champion" of its species because of its size -- died last year and was believed to be about 150 years old. Its canopy, believed to have been the

widest of any tree in Colorado at the time, once stretched across more than 100 feet.

County crews will continue to monitor the tree and keep it wet -- over the next several days, if need be -- but there was no immediate threat to vegetation in the surrounding open space area, Stewart said.

"We are putting lots of water on it," Stewart said, and the hope is that "it will burn itself out."

The cottonwood sits at the base of a gully behind an old irrigation ditch in a northern Boulder County-owned open space area east of a bend of Crane Hollow Road, north of Crane Hollow's junction with St. Vrain Road.

Boulder County has made logs from the tree's fallen limbs available to wood crafters proposing to make artisan works from those limbs.

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